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Marietje Schaake

Marietje Schaake is a Dutch politician for the social liberal party Democrats 66 (D66). Schaake talks about the global debate of freedom of information and Internet freedom, and the EU decisions concerning freedom of information. Her political party D66 has voted for Internet freedom and there’s an increasingly amount of voices sharing this opinion. As she states: “We need to reverse economy over rights include more accountability, transparency in order to be credible to our own citizens but also credible players in the world”.

Friedrich Lindenberg, Tobias Nöbauer

Do you want to look behind the curtains of a 21st century democracy? You might be looking for a `policy drafting tool for distributed groups´ and use it in your art project, your corporate company, your NGO, your government institution or political party . Friedrich Lindenberg is a co-developer for software that assists to succeed in theses tasks called adhocracy or liquid democracy. They strive to bring the manyfold experiences made in online discussion, online collaboration and online decision making into a software that can be used by citizens and parliamentarians together. As his answers show, the interlace between personal, social, legal, privacy-related and technical aspects are part of his everyday work. In an possible reaction to the flailing democratic spirit in Europe, his customers and partners in experiment have been of high profile: the German Parliament in Berlin or the German Pirate Party. The interview is conducted by Tobias Nöbauer and Volker Eckl of Transforming Freedom at the Transmediale 2011 in Berlin.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Henrik Palmgren

Lars Palmgren from Gothenburg interviews the Member of Icelandic Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir from the new Icelandic party The Movement to talk about the financial warfare that has been taking place against the people of Iceland since the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic in September-October 2008 broke out. The governments of London, the Hague and the EU have been,- with the backing of the IMF -, at the heart of what she calls a this `financial blackmail´.

The online whistleblower platform Wikileaks proved to be essential for Icelanders to know about the happenings in the background. This has led Birgitta Jonsdottir and others to develop the most progressive press law of the world, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (immi.is). It is already playing a crucial role in the current attempts for a global harmonisation of laws concerning freedom of speech, the control of online media and whistleblower protection.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Henrik Palmgren

Lars Palmgren from Gothenburg interviews the Member of Icelandic Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir from the new Icelandic party The Movement to talk about the financial warfare that has been taking place against the people of Iceland since the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic in September-October 2008 broke out. The governments of London, the Hague and the EU have been,- with the backing of the IMF -, at the heart of what she calls a this `financial blackmail´.

The online whistleblower platform Wikileaks proved to be essential for Icelanders to know about the happenings in the background. This has led Birgitta Jonsdottir and others to develop the most progressive press law of the world, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (immi.is). It is already playing a crucial role in the current attempts for a global harmonisation of laws concerning freedom of speech, the control of online media and whistleblower protection.

Julian Assange, Birgitta Jónsdóttir

“What happens in European borders doesn’t just affect Europe. It’s used as justification for even more extreme forms of abuse around the rest of the world.”

Journalists, artists and publicists in Europe are increasingly confronted with censorship and self-censorship. Freedom of expression, as well as journalistic freedom is not automatic anymore. While the internet makes borders increasingly irrelevant, freedom of expression, online and offline, become even more relevant. In this panel discussion, Swedish artist Lars Vilks and Dutch author Naema Tahir share their personal experiences with freedom of expression in Europe. Professor Alastair Mullis,UK Defamation Law expert, Julian Assange from WikiLeaks and Birgitta Jonsdottir speak on the legal and political questions surrounding freedom of expression. The event was hosted by MEPs Marietje Schaake and Alexander Lambsdorff.

The first part of the panel covers personal experiences with freedom of expression in Europe with statements by Lars Vilks, Naema Tahir, and Flemming Rose. Lars Vilk reports on the original intention of his Mohammed-cartoons that evoked world-wide protests among Muslims, and how he dealt with the subsequent threats to his life. Naema Tahir speaks about alternative strategies to introduce Western readings to Muslim immigrants and her personal findings on self-censorship as a balance between artistic value and political tool. In a video-statement, Flemming Rose reflects on whether citizens of a democracy should have the right “not to be offended”, and on the problems of context-loss in a globalized information society.

The second part addresses legal and political questions surrounding freedom of expression, featuring Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Julian Assange, and Alastair Mullis. Birgitta Jónsdóttir explains the idea behind the the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative as well as the collective and legal process that enabled its adoption by the parliament. Julian Assange describes how abandoned alliances that guaranteed the protection of values from the European enlightenment are disappearing ever since the end of the cold war. He gives some concrete examples of British libel law cases that he judges as progressive realization of Orwellian horrors as depicted in 1984 and illuminates how secret state censorship blacklists, politically framed as mechanisms to combat child pornography, are functionalized to gag dissident voices. Alastair Mullis informs about the situation of libel law and “libel tourism” in the UK, comments on the debates around a reform of the English defamation law, and weighs up the right of freedom of speech against interests like reputation and privacy.

Karen Reilly, Kim Pham

“A lot of people do not care about privacy until something happens.”

Karen Reilly and Kim Pham are talking on the principals of the Tor network and the reasons for privacy-enhancing technologies on the web. Karen Reilly is Marketing, Fundraising, and Grant Development Director of the Tor Project. Kim Pham is the Outreach Director at Access Now. The interview is led by Armin B. Wagner and Volker Eckl.

Karen Reilly, Kim Pham

“A lot of people do not care about privacy until something happens.”

Karen Reilly and Kim Pham are talking on the principals of the Tor network and the reasons for privacy-enhancing technologies on the web. Karen Reilly is Marketing, Fundraising, and Grant Development Director of the Tor Project. Kim Pham is the Outreach Director at Access Now. The interview is led by Armin B. Wagner and Volker Eckl.

Maxwell Salzberg

What would an alternative Social Networking platform to Facebook look like. How would it respect its users´ right for privacy and allow them to self-control their data over the long term? What would its architecture be and how could people help to improve it? So far, no other project has engaged as intensively into this terrain as the team behind Diaspora*.

Maxwell Salzberg, one of the founders, tells the story of how he and his friends got involved in this project of a “personally controlled, do-it-all, open-source social network” after a talk by FSF lawer Eben Moglen at their university in New York. He answers questions about their technical infrastrucutre, first problems they have been run into and many more. “Our goal is to empower people with their data.”

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Linus Torvalds

In 2005, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, sat down for two weeks to prototype his second major contribution to the Free Software and Open Source world and to the history of computing in general: Git.

This software allows programmers to collaborate on their projects´code in a number of new methods all together. Two years later, Torvalds is invited to speak at Google Tech Talks. He explains the personal, social and technical stories of how the design principles of “Git” emerged in the first place and answers many questions by the programmers of Google Inc.. His talk contains a lot of humourous banter within the Free and Open Source Communites. It has been viewed over 600.000 times online (update December 2011: over 840.000 times; update February 2015: over 1.300.000 times; update December 2016: over 1.670.000 times; update July 2018: over 2 million times) making it one of the most influential media files ever that deals with the inside world of todays programmers. It may proove to be just as interesting for social anthropologists and media philosophers alike.